Communicating with «Robbie» - A case study: (How) Does Robbie provide Transactional Support in Learning Situations?

Background: The prevalence of autistic children is increasing. In the Norwegian project “Robot-supported language development for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ROSA) the robot NAO (called “Robbie” by the pupils) is used to stimulate social interaction and language development. In October-24 pilot 2 in the study will be performed. 8-12 autistic pupils in different language development stages will participate. For each child four robot-child-interactions will be video-recorded. Two teachers will participate in the learning interactions, one being the child’s primary teacher, the other serving as a learning assistant, steering the robot responses with a remote control and providing learning tasks and learning games. The aim of the pilot is to test the feasibility of the robot interactions, establish interrater-agreement of the SCERTS-coding, and determine meaningful outcome measures for a larger study. The SCERTS-method will be used to code the videos SCERTS provides a structured framework and systematic method for selecting educational objectives that are meaningful to the child, family and setting. The original SCERTS Assessment Protocol (SAP) is a curriculum-based assessment tool for gauging individual children’s capacity to use certain skills and to engage in tasks across meaningful, everyday contexts. The emphasis is on understanding the functional role of an individual child’s behaviors and communicative acts. Assessment of a child’s level of social and communicative competence is based on detailed behavioral criteria derived from the SAP. The method focuses on capacity for joint attention and capacity for symbol use. The early language development stage the child has, is identified as a) social partner, b) language partner or c) conversational partner. The different stages require different responses to support learning (transactional support) as well as specific and individual goals. On beforehand the teachers have evaluated the pupils with SCERTS as a baseline. Analyses: The plan is to describe the children´s scores on specifically chosen SCERTS-dimensions as individual cases (social communication; joint attention and symbol use and emotional regulation; mutual regulation and self-regulation). Further the teachers and the robot will be scored on transactional support.
Questions to discuss at OCHER:
Do these measures reveal meaningful outcomes? Discuss possible issues we ran into establishing interrater-agreement.